Catalogue Search | MBRL
Are you sure you want to remove the book from the shelf?
{{itemTitle}}
37
result(s) for
"Gander, Catherine"
Sort by:
Muriel Rukeyser and documentary : the poetics of connection
This study of 20th-century American poet Muriel Rukeyser explores the multiple avenues of her 'poetics of connection' to reveal a profound engagement with the equally intertextual documentary genre.
Book
Mixed messages
Offering a major contribution to the field of American culture and aesthetics in an interdisciplinary frame, this collection assembles the cutting-edge research of renowned and emerging scholars in literature and the visual arts, with a foreword by Miles Orvell. The volume represents the first of its kind: an intervention in current interdisciplinary approaches to the intersections of the written word and the visual image that moves beyond standard theoretical approaches to consider the written and visual artwork in embodied, cognitive and experiential terms. Tracing a strong lineage of pragmatism, romanticism, surrealism and dada in American intermedial works through the nineteenth century to the present day, the editors and authors of this volume chart a new and vital methodology for the study and appreciation of the correspondences between visual and verbal practices.
eBook
Black and White Landscapes: Topographies of Disorientation in the Works of Carrie Mae Weems and Claudia Rankine
In this essay, I explore how the contemporary black female artists Carrie Mae Weems and Claudia Rankine work with photography and text to develop what I call, after the famous 1975 American landscape photography exhibition, a new, anticolonial, topographics. Connecting the geographical and anatomical meanings of the word “topography,” I approach their works via the phenomenology of Sara Ahmed and Frantz Fanon, tracing how the two artists decentre and throw into relief what Ahmed terms “whiteness as orientation.” Enacting an affective, visual politics of discomfort and disorientation, Weems and Rankine, this essay contends, open new terrain from which to encounter the American landscape in visual, corporeal, and phenomenological terms.
Journal Article
\Facing the Fact: Word and Image in Muriel Rukeyser's 'Worlds Alongside'\
[...]appearing two thirds of the way through \"Worlds Alongside,\" Figure 3 demonstrates the layers of meaning constructed in Rukeyser's use of image, text, and format; more precisely, Depression-era documentary photographs (Farm Security Administration [FSA] images by Dorothea Lange and Arthur Rothstein respectively), a textual narrative that both reflects and complicates the images to which it responds, and the double-page configuration that contrives the words and images to face each other. In response to an editorial request for reader reaction to the new photo-essay format asking whether Rukeyser's \"treatment implement[ed] the photo- graph as a significant commentary on human existence\" (Coronet 120) the majority of replies were negative.3 * * * 7 Such reader feedback allows us to comprehend the difficulty that Rukeyser had in introducing her imaginative new method of communication to a public audience, which resoundingly requested a return to the separatist attitudes against which Rukeyser was reacting.
Journal Article
Muriel Rukeyser, America, and the “Melville Revival”
Whilst Muriel Rukeyser's poetic affinity with Walt Whitman is generally acknowledged, the close relation of her work and poetic sensibility to the thought and writing of Herman Melville has somehow gone relatively unnoticed, and almost wholly unexamined. In 1918, Van Wyck Brooks called for the creation of a usable past that would energize America by recasting its cultural tradition. His plea addressed the need to rebuild a national heritage via the rediscovery of culturally “great” figures. By the late 1930s, many scholars and writers had answered the call, and the new discipline of American studies was beginning to take shape, aided by a reclamation of one of the country's greatest, most neglected, writers – Herman Melville. This was also the period in which Rukeyser “came of age”; a time when political and international conflicts and economic crises generated both the stark, documentary representation of present social realities and the drive to retrieve or reconstruct a more golden age that might mobilize a dislocated nation. The following article examines the importance of Melville to Rukeyser's work, and situates her within the “Melville revival” as an important figure in the movement throughout the first half of the twentieth century to reconstruct an American cultural character.
Journal Article
Twenty-six things at once
This essay attends to the creative collaboration between the poet Frank O’Hara and the painter Norman Bluhm in the autumn of 1960 that resulted in the set of artworks entitled Poem-Paintings. By exploring these multivalent works through an equally pluralistic and interdisciplinary approach, it argues their importance as experiments in an American tradition of innovation and aesthetic experience. Mapping a critical path that moves across areas of development in pragmatic thought, I suggest a new vocabulary of criticism and response to abstract intermediality that draws on the classical pragmatism of John Dewey and William James, as well as related philosophical
Book Chapter
Introduction
Word and image studies have advanced immeasurably over the last twenty years or so. As yet, however, the interpretive strategies generated have focused largely on European products and philosophical traditions. This volume represents the first sustained and collective effort to resituate the critical discourse within an intellectual framework more fully matched to the particular contexts and histories of Anglo-American visual-verbal relations in works of artistic experimentation, and to bring together the complex relationships in these works between the imagistic, the symbolic and the concrete. Mixed Messages assembles essays on modern and contemporary works that challenge the historic separation of visual
Book Chapter
The idea, the machine and the art
In this collection we have been arguing, both explicitly and by implication, that image and text works be considered as mixed, blended and hybrid forms that are embedded in bodily and cognitive experience. These moments of attention to word and image are themselves rooted in particular moments in history, and within particular interior and exterior geographies where ‘ the idea becomes a machine that makes the art’, as Sol LeWitt wrote in 1967.² We are therefore advocating an essentially pragmatic approach to multimedia, mixed media and intermedia works which unites the sensual and symbolic in cognition, perception and affect, and
Book Chapter
Muriel rukeyser and the sources of documentary
This thesis explores the sources of documentary in the work of Muriel Rukeyser. It argues for a distinct correlation between her writing and the modes, techniques, and ideologies of the documentary movement as it flourished during the 1930s, the decade in which Rukeyser came of age. Although recent scholarship has noted Rukeyser's debt to the photographic and reportorial trends of the 1930s, such scholarship focuses primarily on her early, modernist poetry, and does not investigate the enduring influence of documentary on her work. My thesis addresses this lack, charting the dialogue that emerged between Rukeyser's relational poetics and documentary's similarly intertextual and interdisciplinary approach to the realities of the world. It posits that Rukeyser's interest and involvement in the various aspects of documentary lasted for the duration of her life. It further argues that this profound connection goes some way to explaining her guiding poetic principles. Chapter one discusses Rukeyser's experimentation with the documentary form of the photo-text. It examines a process by which Rukeyser's belief in the necessity of the confluence of image and word took shape. Chapter two investigates Rukeyser's engagement in the documentary discourse of biography. It examines the extent to which the 1930s' impulse towards the aesthetic and iconographical depiction of human lives informed Rukeyser's own methods of biographical representation. Chapter three locates the sources of Rukeyser's engagement with documentary within the discipline of American Studies, and examines her contribution to the American project of national and literary re-discovery. Chapter four explores Rukeyser's involvement in travel reportage and touring the American landscape. It illustrates how Rukeyser pioneered a poetic cartography that provided witness to both the past and the present. In so doing, she constructed a mapping device by which to read her own poetics of connection.
Dissertation